On his character
Burke on the page was a certain sort of character, but then when I arrived in New Orleans and met up with Michael Wilkinson and Christien Tinsley, who did the tattoo, they really gave me all of the information I needed.
I put on this three-piece suit, and then I was going through hats, and I just put on a bowler hat, and I was like, that reminds me of 'Clockwork Orange,' and that reminds me of Frank Gorshin's Riddler. So that would be my physicality - I wanted to try and make him quite angular and quite rakish, and I definitely got the inspiration through the hat. So I found it all in that bowler hat, to be honest.
I knew that Jimmy [director Jimmy Hayward] wanted quite a sort of boisterous, colorful character to go against John Malkovich's. So that's sort of why I thought of the Riddler in the 1970s - I thought there was something kind of off the wall about that -- and then there's also something very sinister and dangerous about the 'Clockwork Orange' element. So I just sort of mashed them together.
I kind of like wanted to keep the comic book style. But it always has to come from a real person. If you're doing fantasy, in order to take this person on that journey to a fantastical world which is already outside of the realms of reality, the people that occupy that world should be real or coming from some sort of reality.